In a research note, Bank of America’s Ethan Harris and Alexander Lin say their own estimates, as well as that of their sell-side peers, do better historically.

They found that the average absolute error of the end-of-quarter forecasts from GDPnow, as the Atlanta Fed’s model is called, was 0.71 percentage points. That compares to a 0.6% error for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and 0.62% for the Wall Street consensus compiled by Blue Chip.

GDPnow also has a pessimistic take on the second quarter, currently forecasting growth of 0.7%, which again is much lower than Wall Street.

But the B. of A. team says humans do better at the beginning of the quarter. The Atlanta Fed model has an average absolute error of 0.91% in early quarter forecasts, compared with 0.82% for both BofA and Wall Street as a whole.

“It is fair to say that GDPNow is a nice tool, but it does not warrant special attention,” the economists say.

The real lesson to be drawn is that neither man nor machine go a good job of forecasting GDP growth for any one quarter.

“The rather depressing reality is that it is hard to forecast quarterly GDP,” they said.

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